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“Because Tir saved him.” Candlelight spilled over Em’s golden hair like water, and slid to the floor, over stone and woven carpets. “He must have loved poor Ollie so very much. I wish we could say thank you.”
“Perhaps a memorial,” Lou murmured, and Oliver wanted to shriek, to howl, to rip his own heart from his chest, where it was useless anyway.
Of course Tir had known. A mission. A purpose. A fairy-companion. Fairies always had a purpose, coming across the border.
Tir had said it. More than once, even. Not directly, never directly. But he’d said it. If Oliver had ever been listening.
He lay there shaking, in bed, where Tir would have come to find him, to read to him, to yawn and fall asleep with a book in one hand.
“Perhaps when Oliver is feeling better—”
“Perhaps he’ll want to dedicate some sort of site, a library or—”
Oliver rolled onto his side, pulled muffling covers over his head, folded himself into a ball. The preternatural hearing faded. The agony did not. It never did.
His sisters thought Tir had loved him. They didn’t know. No one knew. Tir had never said anything even close to those words. Not like that.
It was only a guess, what his sisters had said. Or if it’d been love, if Tir had loved him, it might’ve been the love of a brother, or an obligation. That purpose. A fairy destiny. And Oliver, who’d only too late figured out his own emotions—not a brotherly love, not a simple loyalty—could never ask, now. Could never hold out a hand and say: would you ever, could you ever, if I asked to properly court you?
He did not know whether the idea, the possibility, made the pain worse or better. If he could have—if Tir had—if they could have, together—
It was worse, he decided. If Tir had stepped into that sacrifice knowingly, loving him, making that choice, while believing Oliver only cared for him as a sibling.
That was worse. That was too cruel. Too much. He couldn’t imagine it. He’d never get up again.
He did grow more used to living with grief after a month or so, though he did not like to think about it: he couldn’t be used to this. He couldn’t go on like this, except that he made himself. Responsibility. Duty. Family.
Walking around with a hole in his chest, stooped over by the weight of emptiness. Old, and broken, and never warm enough even in sun.
The palace staff did not appear to be bothered by his unpracticed random eruptions of magic. They took his answering questions he couldn’t’ve possibly overheard in stride, and learned to cook around his unpredictably too-sensitive taste-buds. They spent a whole week testing creamy soups and soothing stews and various blancmanges. They pitied him, a little, though mostly they felt sympathetic sorrow for the Heir and the Heir’s pain. He could hear as much.
The cooks never baked blueberry pies. The palace maids and footmen left Tir’s room alone.
Oliver avoided the astronomy tower for the first two weeks, and then he thought that Tir wouldn’t’ve wanted that, and he went up alone one night and sat under the stars by the old telescope, the hairpin blunted weight of Tir’s melted knife a kindhearted silent presence in his pocket. Stars hung silver in the night sky, mute and present, recognizable human shapes.
Three weeks in, they held a subdued service, a reading of a simple statement of events and a pouring-out of water: there’d be no body to bury, the Crown Prince had returned from his Quest but remained shaky and ill with grief and magic, and no one really knew what a fairy’d want as a memorial site. They pledged funds to a library expansion, from the personal family coffers and not the kingdom’s treasury; Ellie stood on the dais and kept her voice from breaking with the practice of a queen.
Ollie, standing at her side, could tell that his mother was crying. Cedric put a hand on her shoulder, from the other side.
What looked like the entire population of Bellemare turned up for even that small ceremony, thronging across the Great Lawn and filling banquet tables set out on the green. Ollie did the required amount of accepting gestures and handshakes, barons and baronesses, condolences and commiseration, bluff stonecutters and barkeeps thumping him on the back. He wasn’t thinking. He couldn’t think. Mechanical nods and hand-clasps.
Their farmer friend from the ride North arrived late and dusty and said, “Oh, lad, come here—” and pulled him into a rough unpracticed hug. That was real, and physical. Oliver remembered Tirian finding lost pigs and laughing about moon-grass and blue milk, and discovered himself shaking.
Someone—the palace baker, he thought—pushed him out of the crowd and onto a bench, and brought him plain ale and bread and cheese. He’d lost the Crown Prince’s coronet again; that didn’t matter. He was another mourner, one among the rest of the kingdom, though his loss was sharper and more intimate.
He’d been there. He’d failed Tir.
His sisters went home, after: Em with her stoic slender husband, who nodded at Ollie and patted his wife’s shoulder and held her hand, and Lou on her own but meeting up with a friend for the journey back down to school. They did not want to leave, he knew—he heard as much—but needed to attend to their own people, their own lands, their own lives. Em asked him to come and stay over Midwinter, to see his newest niece or nephew; Lou ordered him to write and offered her own student-physician rooms, bare and light and airy in desert sun, if he wanted a change of scenery.
They told him he was doing fine, he would be fine; and they hugged him before going, as if physical closeness could make the words be true.
Cedric gazed at him with worry, and hovered in his orbit with an unnerving degree of attentiveness. Oliver, once able to think about this, understood that his youngest sibling was trying to cope with infinite weight: Cedric had essentially lost one older brother and nearly the other, and had been the one to ride out and find the aftermath.
Ollie pulled himself together long enough to clasp his brother’s shoulder and say, “Thanks for being here.” Cedric looked at him like a man betrayed by emotion, and came back with hot cocoa, rich and comforting and cinnamon-spiced and brandy-spiked; they drank in silence.
Oliver bundled himself up in furs and heavy wool as bitter weather billowed in. He grew out his beard, thick and golden. At first that was just because he couldn’t be bothered to shave, and then he thought maybe he liked it, maybe he looked older, or maybe that was something else, around his eyes.
Tir had not ever grown any sort of beard. Tir had tolerated the cold because he liked wintry fashion, scarves and long coats.
